Tag: statistics

Every year, the Institute for Economics and Peace Research puts out a report breaking out the status of peace and war over the last year. It’s the nerdiest and most amazing thing for political science nerds who obsess over data, so I highly recommend it.

One of the findings is that war costs the world economy over a trillion dollars per year. Peacekeeping cost less than 1% of that. Peacekeeping can be hard to motivate support for. It simultaneously seems scarily globalist, abusive, rapey, and ineffective, all at once. But that’s a shame. Because despite any flaws, it’s an incredibly productive investment. Crimes committed by the police very rarely result in calls for the abolishment of the idea of having police at all.

Cost savings from peacekeeping can be over 16 times the cost. 53% of peacekeeping activities are in active warzones, and the average length of an operation is only 31 months (with a few ongoing outliers). If the world could put the resources needed into peacekeeping in the next 10 years, the cost avoidance could be almost $3 trillion. And hidden behind those sterile dollars are a lot of real human lives.

Image by Dawit Rezene, via Wikimedia Commons

IEP estimates show that the cost of violent conflict in 2013 was over 120 times higher thanpeacebuilding and peacekeeping funding.The potential benefits from investing further in peacebuilding are substantial. Based on IEP’s model of the cost-effectiveness of peacebuilding, the total peace dividend that the international community would reap if it increased peacebuilding commitments over the next ten years could be as high as US $2.94 trillion. Global Peace Index 2017

The world is dominated by negative headlines. Single horrible events, like terrorist attacks or natural disasters. But, in the background, millions of people are making slow and steady progress making our world infinitely better than the world of our ancestors.

One striking example is the global poverty rate. As recently as the 90s, the portion of humanity that lived in extreme poverty was well over half. Now? As of 2015, it’s estimated that fewer than one in ten people suffer through the same meager existence. The biggest gains have been in India and China, but the progress is truly global.

It’s entirely possible that someone reading this post will see a world within their lifetime where almost no person ever has to wonder where their next meal is coming from.

“In East Asia and Pacific the extreme poverty rate fell from 61 percent in 1990 to 7 percent in 2012, and in South Asia it fell from 51 percent to 19percent (figure 1a). In contrast, SubSaharan Africa’s extreme poverty rate did not fall below its 1990 level until 2002. Based on national growth rates over the past 10 years, the global extreme poverty rate is estimated to be below 10 percent in 2015, a drop of more than two-thirds since 1990.”The World Bank